Green Day for Wi-Fi, For Cisco

I was walking up 8th Avenue in Manhattan yesterday, listening to Green Day on my IPod, as I wove my way through the pedestrian tango of Midtown. “Time grabs you by the wrist and directs you where to go”I grabbed Unstrung’s Dan Jones by his wrist and pulled him into the new Hearst Tower, which has been officially designated the first building to receive a Gold LEED certified rating for “core and shell and interiors” in New York City from the United States Green Building Council. Building on a series of “diagrid” traingles, reaching upwards, like a series of giant glass and metal slashes 46 stories into the sky, the Hearst Tower is a marvel of technology, ecology and architecture. And -this is where Dan comes in — it turns out Hearst has deployed a Unified Wireless LAN throughout the entire 856,000 square feet of the Tower, to help it meet both its mobility needs as well as support its green strategy. http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=104257&WT.svl=news2_1Rising out of the stone Art Deco shell of the earlier Hearst building, the 46 floor tower- Used 20% less steel to construct- Reycled 90% of the materials of the original building- Is furnished with bio-sustainable materials for the furniture and carpeting- Uses sensors (vs. light switches) to turn off the power in rooms when no one is in them- Uses RF shielding to keep the building cool (and, interesting, lowers the amount of RF signal bleed out of the building)- Collects rainwater from the room which is collected in a 16,000 gallon tank to provide a magnificent waterfall in the atrium and cooling for the lower floors. For more on the Tower: http://hearst.com/tower/Hearst deployed 260 Lightweight Access Points and 4 WLAN Controllers to provide pervasive mobility services to the more than 2000 employees and thousands of annual visitors working in the Tower. The WLAN connections are delivered through Mobile Access’s Distributed Antenna System (DAS), which also delivers cellular connectivity across the building from base stations from Cingular, Verizon, and T-Mobile.So can wireless be a green technology? Seven environmental drivers stand out how:- Seamlessly roaming around the building (including the magnificent atrium), increases productivity and more fully utilizes the available space- Providing guest networking features allows other users to access the network and avoid traveling back to their offices or to a hotspot- The DAS system reduces cabling: o Requiring less metal to be used o Fewer cables to be pulled and powered (e.g., POE). o Efficiently deliver multiple wireless signals to users while preserving the key features of the Unified system- Reducing costs and energy expended in moves/adds/changes as people change workspace- Supporting location-based services such as asset-tracking can save time and energy. – Enabling real-time access to Web 2.0 types of info and systems can reduce both increase worker productivity and eliminate to print documents or carry CDs or DVDs for accessing relevant work media.. [Warning: Relevant Diversion Alert] The 400 CDs worth of music on my IPod, if they are all delivered digitally, eliminate the need to burn CDs, wrap them in plastic cases that will sit in garbage heaps for thousands of years.- Supporting, over time, additional environmental sensors Imagine using the technology we build to reduce strain on precious earth? Wow, my benchmark lesson came from a company in the printing and media business?Today our CEO John Chambers, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, announced a signficant Carbon Reduction Initiative, as ever, showing Cisco’s focus on using our own technology to run our business more efficiently. Now we are using our technology to reduce carbon emissions. For more on this effort: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2006/ts_092106.html?CMP=ILC-001For me, it was a green day in New York. Or as Green Day said in their song”Are We the Waiting”:”œStarry nights, city lights coming down over meSkyscrapers, stargazers in my head.”You thought I was going to say Rosebud?

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